Distributed Work (review)

In Distributed Work, editors Pamela Hinds and Sara Kiesler have assembled an impressive array of case studies which reveal the current thinking on best practices for organizations trying to distribute certain kinds of professional research and design work over time and space, aided by the latest digital information and communication technologies. Fortunately, out of some eighteen essays in this book, three do take a historical view, though only two of those—one by Michael O'Leary, Wanda Orlikowski, and JoAnne Yates on the Hudson's Bay Company as a distributed organization, and another by Jae Yun Moon and Lee Sproull on the Linux kernel as a distributed design project— offer focused narratives of the kind familiar to Technology and Culture readers.

Yet in this 475-page volume, such a brief nod to the history of technology is actually more frustrating than useful. The historical articles create a bridge from the 1700s to today, but entirely leapfrog the history of distributed work that was enabled by the electromechanical technologies of post office, telegraph, and telephone from the 1850s to the 1950s. And most of the essays pay little heed to the lessons of historical analysis, asserting not only that distributed work is nothing new but also that it is subject to timeless rules of organizational psychology. The real lesson from historical examples, however, should be that the definition of distributed work is itself subject to change and needs to be set in the context of a particular time and place, specified in each case by a particular social, spatial, temporal, and technological division of labor.

Part of this problem may be due to the disciplines from which most of the volume's contributions were drawn: communication/information studies, business/management research, and human-computer interaction research. Absent from the collection are, surprisingly, the economic and human geographers who have been analyzing and theorizing such spatial/ temporal divisions of labor for decades—let alone labor and business historians who have already assembled a vast literature of case studies on distributed work and distributed organization across time and space.

Focused as they are on the present, most of the articles in Distributed Work assume a set of idealized professional business and academic actors, without any reference to complicated and often problematic social relations of labor: hierarchies of decision making and control over the work of others; hierarchies of communication and access to information deemed relevant by others; hierarchies of educational investment and years of seniority on the job; hierarchies of income and wage levels and benefit packages; and hierarchies of temporal commitment, from full-time workers to part-time temps and just-in-time consultants. Where are the technicians? Where are the secretaries? And are how are they distributed in time and space?

Perhaps the most striking assumption throughout the book (even in the historical pieces) is the assertion that "collocated work" is inevitably the optimal work arrangement, which distributed work must always strive to emulate through various forms of technology. But this begs the question. Why distribute work if doing so results in a product and/or a work experience so obviously inferior to that of collocated work? Something must motivate the distribution of work—whether cost savings, decreased turnover time, increased control over labor, increased ability to dissolve "work teams" at a moment's notice, or local market access—and thus the question of who decides when, where, and how work is to be distributed needs to be explicitly addressed. Historians of technology and work—especially historians of the labor necessary to (but often rendered invisible by) digital, computer-mediated information and communication technologies—may find this volume to be an interesting primary-source snapshot of the way that current "flexible production" and "virtual organization" global management strategies can result in a particular spatial, temporal, and technological division of labor for a particular high-skill (and presumably high-wage) subset of the workforce. But what is...